Ever since this site first covered Sebastian Masuda’s mission to spread his take on Japanese kawaii culture worldwide back in 2010 there have been those on the sidelines unsure whether it would find an audience beyond those already converted to Japanese pop-culture at large. Even as late as 2013 when I interviewed Masuda there were still dissenting voices, albeit mainly from the self-elected ombudsmen of Japanese culture abroad trying to articulate the face of the country abroad instead of just looking at it. Now with the responding success of events like Hyper Japan in London, [...]

I love Moomins. There’s a quality to Tove Jansson’s creations that I find incredibly soothing and relaxing – yes, I was slightly terrified of the cartoon series as a child (who wasn’t?!), but I’ve been able to put that behind me, and then some. It’s almost impossible not to find Moomins virtually everywhere you look in Japan, and the country has had a long-term love affair with Moomintroll, Moominmama, Moominpapa and their friends and neighbours. Japan produced animated series, comic books and was visited by Jansson herself. The Moomin licensing business is particularly healthy, with Moomins popping [...]

The New Year is a reminder, albeit hardly necessary, that fashion is never static, punctuated as it by the shift between S/S to A/W and 2014 to 2015. The subcultures are no different, moving, but marked in their own way, whether it is the elusive exhibition, rare guerilla runway, or else in the case of Akihabara fashion’s most public proponent – Akiba Noise – an upgrade to 3.0. The latest installment which opened its doors on the 25th saw fashion designer mainstays of the genre Mikio Sakabe, Rurumu, Noriko Nakazato, Ryota Murakami and M5YKB joined by illustrators regular readers [...]

Anarchic art collective Chim-Pom are no strangers to the world of fashion, memorably collaborating with none other than Mikio Sakabe back in spring summer 2011 and outfitting Garter’s LaForet limited shop in January of this year. It would fair to say that their contributions to fashion are of a critical nature, not necessarily adding to fashion, but the voice of dissent, the protestor outside Forever 21, the person who doesn’t clap out of politeness during a fashion show, a reminder that the status quo might well need challenging at some point. However, Chim-Pom don’t necessarily make their position [...]

Wut Berlin took their AW 2014-15 fashion show to arise reborn as WUT, and beyond the emphatic fitting of an iconic boutique responsible for shocking Tokyo’s own denizens, it is also a name that acknowledges that as an institution, it is not identifiable with the fashion of any one city, but rather a single manifesto drawn up from fashion’s freethinkers from all over the globe. The fact that WUT’s creative director, Yann Le Goec chooses to operate out of Tokyo is a contribution to the city that I for one would not like to see disappear, but seeing [...]